Now, maybe the idea of a gaming peripheral being important to Apple doesn't make sense to you. After all, Apple is all about gaming apps and the like on the iPhone and iPad, but its Mac line is still largely fed the scraps enjoyed by regular ol' PC gamers. (We'd specify PCs running Windows, but even folks running Linux and other alternative OSes tend to get to games faster than Mac users.)

Point is, Apple was interested in the Kinect — interested enough to toss down "a stack of crippling legal agreements and NDAs" (non-disclosure agreements) — but Inon Beracha, the man who was shopping the Kinect technology around Silicon Valley, was put off by the way Apple went about it.

Of course, hindsight is 20/20 and all that. There's no way Apple would know that the Kinect, which was originally developed by the Israeli military — which in turn got PrimeSense CEO Inon Beracha to drum up interest for it — would fall into Microsoft's hands and turn into a massive push for its game division. That said, Beracha and his associates thought Apple was "the most natural place for the technology" after the company's work on pioneering news ways to interface with technology after the iPhone came out.

It's worth noting that back in the day, the Mac was as viable a gaming machine as a PC. The Mac had a core of strong, loyal developers such as Bungie, which made the Marathon series for the Mac and went on to do Halo for the Xbox after Microsoft acquired the company — something that pissed Steve Jobs off so much he actually put in a call to Microsoft.

That said, Kinect didn't even need to be geared toward gaming. Apple could have done whatever it wanted with it. Whatever Apple's reason for letting it slip through the cracks, it's clear that its approach didn't work with Beracha.